At this stage in the game, after Tamra Barney's been thoroughly vilified, Kim Zolciak's been mocked to within an inch of her life, Danielle Staub and Kelly Bensimon have been nationally named both crazy and stupid, and Teresa Giudice has been crowned the queen of vapid new money trash, I cannot understand why anyone would agree to participate in a Real Housewives show. It irreversibly turns you into a joke and it reportedly doesn't even pay that great -- there has to be something very wrong with you to want to do this. But here we go again, with five new women desperate enough to be famous that they'd agree to act like this on television.

Save for Breaking Bad's sorely disappointing hiatus from our screens, Adventures in Reality Television is the pervading theme of today's news roundup -- most notably the planning of a convention for reality show fans to congregate and obsess in all things fame-whorish and brain-damaging. I'm totally reserving tickets.

Hey, remember when George Lucas said that he was going to make a live-action Star Wars TV series? Remember how excited everyone was? I'm not even a big Star Wars fan anymore, and yet I was beyond psyched about getting to visit this rich world of characters on a weekly basis. I hate the prequels, and I could care less about the cartoons, but for some reason I had it in my head that this TV show, which would reportedly feature bounty hunters and would take place before the original trilogy, could be a return to what was great about the franchise in the first place. Then the Clone Wars cartoon stretched into a second season, and an animated comedy series was announced, and no progress seemed to get made on the live-action show. Well, now it's "on hold." Um, excuse me?

Media calls with television talent are often an overly-coached exercise in futility, and though yesterday's ABC call with Ali Fedotowsky, Roberto and Chris L. wasn't quite as pointless as an American Idol call, it was pretty goddamn close. So I just decided to post the real questions and answers with a helpful little translation of what these Bachelorette-ites really mean with their scripted answers. Enjoy, and feel free to play along in the comments.

Ex-American Idol executive producer and SYTYCD judge Nigel Lythgoe may be the next American Idol judge (is Fox really that lazy?), and TV news gets a blast from the past with Carol Burnett, Lou Ferrigno and Ryan O'Neal. Can you figure which one of these three we'd rather not see in today's news?...

The ever-expanding Real Housewives empire puts another flag in the ground tomorrow night as Bravo sets their cameras on some attention-starved D.C. ladies. There will be cat fights, as there are always cat fights, but this time a few of these cat fights will be about issues. Political issues! Oh, how scholarly. And what fun! I recently joined a promotional conference call with two of the ladies -- Mary Amons and Stacie Scott Turner, neither of whom crashed a White House party, so you've never heard of them -- to find out what's in store for this season. They basically think the show is Meet the Press, which is just absolutely precious.

I thought that Jersey Shore would be bringing all the South Beach based reality TV craziness to my TV this summer. I was wrong. The Bad Girls Club is back, this time in Miami, and the premiere episode alone was filled with so much dizzying chaos that I can only imagine what the rest of the season has in store.

My expectations for this show were pretty low. It's summertime. It's a comedy. It's on The CW. It's a Canadian import. That's a lot of things to be wary of. In fact, the only reason that I even watched was because of my undying love for Degrassi and because former Degrassi alum Stacey Farber was on the show. She was the sweet little Ellie who had a crush on a gay guy and began secretly cutting. However, there's nothing even remotely that interesting here.

Break out your chinchilla fur-lined hippie jacket and your John Lennon-meets-Jackie O sunglasses, because The Rachel Zoe Project is back and less dramatic than ever -- sans the terrible Taylor this time around...

Smallville Season Ten hasn't even started yet, but it looks like they're ready for the show to go the way of Krypton. At the Television Critics Association press tour, the president of the CW said that she'd love to say that Smallville is going off the air and "something else is coming on." With sci-fi adventurer Blue Beetle and time-travelling egotist Booster Gold rumored to appear on Smallville this season, they're the frontrunners for a spin-off series, but we can think of a bunch of DC superheroes who are much more deserving.